Space

One of my first memories as a child in the 1950s was a discussion I had with my brother in our tiny bedroom in the family house in Bethlehem. We had heard in school about a planet called Pluto. It was the farthest, coldest and darkest thing a child could imagine. We guessed how long it would take to die if we stood on the surface of such a frozen place wearing only the clothes we had on. We tried to figure out how much colder Pluto was than Antarctica or than the coldest day we had ever experienced in Pennsylvania. Pluto — which famously was demoted from a "major planet" to a "dwarf planet" in 2006 — captured our imagination because it was a mystery that...

Related "Space" Articles

Newly released evidence in the investigation of last fall's crash of an experimental spaceship over the Mojave Desert is raising questions about whether federal aviation regulators are protecting the public as companies launch more rockets.
When Virgin...

Scientists with the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission may have had a scare when the Philae lander bounced off of the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, but the bumpy touchdown actually had a silver lining: It allowed them to take...

Scientists have detected a powerful glowing aurora in the atmosphere of a celestial body known as a brown dwarf, light-years away from our solar system.
The discovery suggests that when it comes to the behavior of their magnetic fields, brown dwarfs --...

Mysterious molecules floating through interstellar space have been siphoning away shards of the starlight that reaches Earth, and scientists have long tried — and failed — to identify the culprits.
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Get ready to see Pluto like you’ve never seen it before. Scientists with NASA’s New Horizons mission have released fresh images taken by the spacecraft, and these unprecedented views of the dwarf planet’s surface are nothing short of spectacular.
Even...

Astronomers digging through data from NASA's planet-hunting Kepler space telescope say they have discovered the closest Earth-like "twin" circling another star ever found.
The planet, called Kepler-452b, is about 60% larger in diameter than...

Astronomers using a giant radio telescope in the Atacama Desert of Chile have sighted the star-forming hotspot in a lopsided galaxy that was still growing when the universe was just 800 million years old.
The findings, published in Monthly Notices of the...

SpaceX founder Elon Musk said Monday that the company believes its rocket disintegrated last month after a small steel band purchased from a subcontractor snapped under pressure.Musk said the investigation's preliminary conclusions point to the...

Days after the first Federal Aviation Administration-approved drone delivery successfully dropped off medicine at a Virginia health fair, researchers behind the mission are already looking ahead to future uses of this technology -- in humanitarian crises....

To get through a day's work at the office, Kenyetta McCurdy-Byrd needs to pack an entire toolbox.
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Claudia Alexander, a NASA scientist who oversaw the dramatic conclusion of the space agency's long-lived Galileo mission to Jupiter and managed the United States' role in the international comet-chasing Rosetta project, died July 11 at Methodist...

NASA took a flier on its photo safari to Pluto, betting that a journey of 9 1/2 years and 3 billion miles to get sort of close and not even stop would yield some great pix. It did; in fact, what the New Horizons spacecraft sent back was a revelation....

NASA's New Horizons mission has revealed that Pluto's largest moon, Charon, is full of surprises, including a strange feature that scientists are calling "a mountain in a moat."
You can see it in the upper left corner of the inset in the...

It's official: New Horizons has survived its close flyby of the Pluto system unscathed.
“We have a healthy spacecraft, we have a healthy system, and we are outbound for Pluto,” Alice Bowman, mission operations manager for New Horizons, said Tuesday night...

Pluto may be a dwarf planet, but it’s got an out-sized heart. Before NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew past the icy world, it snapped and sent back this image showcasing the big, bright, heart-shaped feature covering a large part of the surface.
...

After a nearly decadelong journey, the New Horizons spacecraft zoomed past Pluto early Tuesday. The dwarf planet is now the most distant object ever visited by humanity.
New Horizons' closest approach was scheduled for 4:49 a.m. PDT when the...

New Horizons is in the home stretch. With fewer than 500,000 miles and less than a day to go until the NASA spacecraft whizzes by Pluto, the images it’s lobbing back across the roughly 3-billion-mile distance between Earth and Pluto are continuing to turn...

For 9-1/2 years, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has sped through space at more than 30,000 mph on a one-way trip to Pluto. But when it finally gets to its distant destination, it has no plans to slow down.
"We are just flying by, so the...

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The closer New Horizons gets to Pluto, the more puzzling the dwarf planet becomes.
The latest image released by NASA highlights four mysterious dark spots lined up along Pluto’s equator. Each of the spots is about 300 miles across, and they are evenly...